Friday, September 30, 2016

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more
glorious Exploder
Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for
the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here
in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or
improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if
you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can
be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

"Fatty" Cheung (Kent Cheng) is not the luckiest of men. He might have a
solidly running business selling gas, a doting mother, a loving little daughter
and a pretty if costly wife (Lily Lee), but he's bound to lose all of it faster
than he could have expected.

When Cheung comes home early on his wedding anniversary, he finds his wife
having a bit of adulterous fun with a decidedly thinner and younger man than
himself. Cheung is not the kind of man prone to violent outbursts, so he just
protests limply that the couple really shouldn't do it in his living room and
skitters away to get drunk.

That wasn't Cheung's best idea. When he's so drunk he really doesn't know
what he's saying anymore, a girl named Fanny (Esther Kwan) talks him into
getting a little payback on his wife. She knows the right man for the job,
too.

Said right man is a member of a Vietnamese gang, and - showing the low
standard of customer service in the gangster business - for him, a mumbled "she
should be dead" by a drunk guy lying puking and crying in the gutter is an
assassination order. He takes all of Cheung's cash as an advance payment and
gets on his way.
Some time in the morning, Cheung, of course not remembering a thing, stumbles
home only to find his wife and her boyfriend still at it. They're not doing it
for long anymore, though, because a bunch of Cheung's gang "friends" break into
the apartment, rape and kill the wife, kill the boyfriend and leave Cheung alive
and ready to be arrested.

The Hong Kong police's Inspector Man (Danny Lee doing a guest stint in his
usual role, but strangely abstaining from hitting anyone with a phone book) is
sure that there's something fishy about the affair, but he can't prove anything,
and Cheung isn't talking, so he lets the man go.

The police will turn out to be the least of Cheung's problems anyway. Turns
out that the gang is rather enraged about his being in the apartment when they
did the deed. They are even less pleased that Cheung can't pay what he owes
them. Blowing up Cheung's gas business seems like a fine way to show that
displeasure.

At that point, Cheung decides to go into hiding in a house he owns somewhere
in what goes for the country in Hong Kong. As bad luck will have it, he finds it
occupied by a gang of mainland Chinese gangsters. Those guys at least aren't too
mean to him, though. As a matter of fact, Wah, the youngest of them, eager to
distinguish himself as a hard guy like his brother Ching Fung (Simon Yam), even
promises to help Cheung out with his problem with the Vietnamese.

Unsurprisingly, Wah's intervention doesn't end too well, leaving some of his
colleague's dead, and Wah, Cheung and Fanny in the hands of their enemies. Ching
Fung comes slaughtering to the rescue a bit later, but at that point, Wah is
nearly dead from torture.

A bit later, he truly is dead, and Ching Fung is very, very angry and also
quite insane. This can't end well for Cheung or his family.

Billy Tang has directed quite a few of these ripped-from-the-headlines Hong
Kong CAT III crime films with a nasty bend, with Red to Kill probably
his best known film. At first, I thought Run and Kill would be one of
the more harmless films of its type, with just enough of sex and violence to
give it Hong Kong's adult rating, but it turned out that the film's slow and
harmless beginning was just Tang's way to produce an adequate drop height.

The further the film goes along the nastier its tone gets. It really isn't
the way the violence itself is depicted that gets to you here, it is the nature
of the violence itself. What happens to Cheung's daughter Pinky is one of the
more shocking things I've ever seen in a film, even for the usually not very
friendly world of CAT III cinema.

Much of the film's harsh emotional effect has to do with Tang's immensely
tight direction. Apart from an absolutely useless scene with Lee that exposits
about plans of the mainland gangsters which will have no import at all on the
rest of the movie, Run and Kill wastes no time with scenes that have no
importance for the growing sense of doom and desperation that permeates it.

The film is bathed in the typical cold blue of a 90s Hong Kong production, a
cold light that is to the film and others of its kind what shadow is to the
American noir.

In a sense, the noir seems like an apt comparison for Run and Kill
and other of the more ambitious CAT III crime films. Tang's film and
Hollywood's noirs share a sense of absurdity, a love of coincidences (or the
believe in a malevolent universe) which make bad situations worse. And how noir
is the film's basic story about a seemingly happy man losing everything through
a mixture of his own stupidity and sheer bad luck?

Of course, there is one thing that divides a CAT III cinema like this and
noir quite harshly: it is the way they relate to violence.

Where the Hollywood movies only imply violence and often use their thick
shadows to hide it, the Hong Kong films go all out with it, sleazily wallowing
in it. Sometimes this is surely out of pure exploitational instinct, but at
other times, like in Run and Kill's particular case, I can't shake the
feeling that this is very much a difference born out of a more honest nihilism
in the Asian films. In a sense, the Hollywood noir wouldn't let go of a concept
of morality (in part surely out of reasons of censorship, but only in part),
admitting to the darkest sides of humanity and the world itself, yet still
judging them as if there were a moral instance to be judged by and hoping as if
there were something better to hope for.

CAT III has given up on that. You can't show a father having to watch his
little girl burned to death and later running around cradling her charred
remains and try to put a moral bend on it, and Run and Kill never
does. The film's nihilism runs much too deep to still put trust into a concept
of hope. The still humanist "Look, isn't is sad and terrible?" of the noir has
transformed into the simple command to LOOK.

Thursday, September 29, 2016

On first look, John Wayne Cleaver (Max Records) is your typical teenage
outsider in your typical US small town – socially awkward, with only one actual
friend, and rather more interested in weird stuff than his peers. “Weird
stuff” in John’s case being serial killers and death.

Unlike most teenage outsiders, though, John is a diagnosed sociopath who has
set himself a whole load of rules he follows to be “normal”, and not go around
murdering people. Although as the film – and Records – plays him, I’m not sure
his therapist isn’t misdiagnosing heavy social anxieties and depression.

Be that as it may, John’s home town is struck by a series of murders, with
the victims brutally ripped apart and missing one body part or organ a piece.
Looks as if the place has its own serial killer now. John soon finds out the
killer is his elderly, friendly neighbour Mister Crowley (Christopher Lloyd).
Turns out the man’s not exactly human. Knowing this and doing something about it
will turn out to be rather different things for John.

Unfortunately, the film never really explains why a guy who supposedly has no
empathy at all for other human beings would feels the need to do something
about Crowley at all, giving us a sociopathic central character whose difference
Billy O’Brien’s film never really makes enough use of. In fact, the film seems
to shy away from ever facing what it says doesn’t go on in its main
character full on, and without the therapist character telling us repeatedly,
John wouldn’t actually read as a sociopath. This does of course weaken all of
the film’s attempts at contrasting Mister Crowley, who does his deeds to a
degree out of love, with John who doesn’t do bad things because it says so in
the script, and leaves us with a rather more well-worn story of a small town kid
discovering his neighbour is a monster.

I really think the film – I don’t know about the novel by Dan Wells this is
based on – misses interesting possibilities there. In general, the film’s
approach to everything seems a bit too low key to me, be it Crowley’s
true nature, John’s interior life, or dramatic tension.

I Am Not a Serial Killer isn’t exactly boring, mind you, it feels
more like an attempt at making a horror movie which follows the outside markers
of indie dramas about teenagers and forgets about the bit where it needs to
actually build tension. Instead it would rather introduce a bunch of characters
who won’t have any import on the plot or its characters (for example, why is the
girl who has a crush on John even in the movie?).

The film’s approach just seems a bit too harmless for the sort of
thing it is supposed to be about, never actually willing to face the abyss and
the things this abyss suggests about people head-on. Instead the film dithers on
a perfectly competent level without ever committing to anything terribly
interesting.

Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Warning: despite this being one of the write-ups where I try to write around
various elements of the film, I can’t keep it completely spoiler free.

Korea, 1938, which is to say, right in the middle of the country’s final
phase under Japanese occupation. Because she’s suffering from tuberculosis,
Joo-ran (Park Bo-yeong) – also going by the assimilated Japanese name of Shizuko
– is loaded off by her stepmother at a somewhat curious boarding school that
concerns itself primarily – beside side-lines in pro-Japanese propaganda,
“discipline”, and stitching – with treating its various ill and/or
disenfranchised schoolgirls with injections prepared by the headmistress (Eom
Ji-won). There’s also quite an emphasis on physical education, for the most
formidable of the girls is bound to go to Tokyo to vaguely defined better things
one can’t help but think is a horrible joke on the girls.

Joo-ran is more or less replacing another girl whose Japanese name was also
Shizuko, who one day just left without saying goodbye to anyone. The first
Shizuko’s two best friends have opposite emotional reactions to Joo-ran:
Yeon-deok (Park So-dam) is particularly nice to the emotionally somewhat fragile
girl while Yuka – we never learn her real name – (Kong Ye-ji) is as abusive as
she can get away with. Joo-ran pretty much falls in love with Yeon-deok.
However, things at the boarding school are rather more weird than it first
seems. The original Shizuko was only the first girl to just disappear without
saying goodbye, so something about the place certainly is not quite as it seems,
or rather, even worse than it seems.

What that is, director Lee Hae-yeong’s film leaves open for quite some time,
in its first half capably hinting at everything between the horrors of the time
it takes place in to ghostly activity to an unreliable narrator. The film uses
its time early on for creating the mood of the boarding school, setting up
Joo-ran’s relations to her new school mates, bathing everything in a dreamy
light that can change to the nightmarish at a moment’s notice. Appropriate to
its title, The Silenced is, until an hour or so in, a rather quiet film
which at first suggests nothing too fantastical will be going on in it, until it
very suddenly gets much louder, much pulpier, and a bit cruder than anyone
watching could have expected.

That’s not a bad thing, mind you, for the film works rather hard at preparing
its tonal shift, and once it has come, Lee shows the same capability for setting
an appropriate (which is to say, pleasantly over the top while never over the
budget) tone, until stuff goes down in a way you really didn’t expect at all
thirty minutes into the film. And while the film’s bad guys certainly are
melodramatic pulp villains at their core, the film doesn’t ignore the somewhat
more subtle character work it has done before on the girls, so while the genre
shift it takes is certainly not the most obvious way to go, the main characters
still feel like the same girls they were before. Only now girls who have been
dragged into a rather more painful and excitable world.

Lee’s direction is typical of South Korean genre work: it’s visually slick,
knows how to use that slickness to provide a scene with layers of meaning, is
very good as misdirecting its audience while playing fair, and still finds room
to let the actors do their work. Said actors, or really, actresses, for
like most proper horror films made in the last few decades this is concentrated
on women, do their respective jobs very well indeed in turn, even though these
teenage girls are played by women in their mid-twenties.

So, if you find someone – like not-so-very-past me – doubting that South
Korea is still a great source of technically superior genre films that also know
how to use that technique for more than showing off, you just might want to
point him or her at The Silenced.

Tuesday, September 27, 2016

American Melissa (Camille Montgomery) and her Italian boyfriend Carlo (Mario
Rivelli) plan on having a fine time staying at an old seaside villa in Naples
that belongs to Carlo’s family. It’s certainly an interesting place, featuring a
grotto with some kind of temple in it, an evil boy ghost, and a secret dark
history of violence and not quite successful demonic rituals.

Needless to say, Melissa – because it’s never the guy getting possessed in
this sort of film, unless it is 1920 London – soon finds herself under
demonic attack. Fortunately, Carlo manages to rope in help in form of
demonologist Anna De Luca (Shalana Santana). See how I don’t put the word
“competent” before demonologist?

For my taste, Giordany Orellana’s The Grotto is placed very much in
the awkward middle of low budget horror. It’s too well made on a technical level
to be called bad, but it doesn’t feature much exciting or interesting enough to
be called good either. As is too often the case with films I watch, we are again
in the realm of somewhat boring competence, by definition not a place where
excitement dwells.

The acting is generally decent – though some not me might be irritated by the
non-native speakers giving their lines in accented English and I certainly
wasn’t too fond of ghost boy’s performance – but there’s little interesting for
the actors to do; even Melissa’s possession is a rather low key thing with a bit
of catatonia followed by a bit of violence, followed by Demonic Butt Sex.

That last element of the finale did raise an eyebrow, though: I don’t think
it is well advised to feature a finale that is based on the male lead trying to
reach the female lead before the demon going at her from behind is finished with
his business, but then, that might just be me.

Sunday, September 25, 2016

Most Likely to Die (2015): Even though the presence of Perez
Hilton as an “actor” and Jake Busey as the star power in the cast and a deeply
generic sounding set-up don’t exactly promise a world of excitement, I did
expect this to be quite a bit better than it actually was because its director
Anthony DiBlasi has a track record of making not terribly original but very
decent to very good low budget horror films. Well, at least the not terribly
original bit still holds, for this is as generic a slasher as you could (not)
ask for, with basically nothing happening on screen I’m still going to remember
a day after watching it.

DiBlasi’s direction is disinterested, the script yawn-inducing, and the
acting goes from pretty damn bad (Hilton) to kinda okay (Heather Morris and Tess
Christiansen) to painfully neutral (everyone else). There are some okay effects
somewhere in there but honestly, who cares?

There’s Nothing Out There (1991): Of course, it can always
be worse. Case in point is Rolfe Kanefsky’s spam in a cabin horror “comedy”.
It’s self aware horror of the kind that thinks stating how awful and dumb it is
somehow makes it less awful and dumb, and that being crap on purpose will
somehow magically transform it into something not crap. After all, it worked for
some other films, right? Alas, the bad movie fairy didn’t kiss this one, so we
get lots and lots of nudity (Kanefsky looking into the future of his career as
softcore director?) – this being a film where a short skinny dipping sequence is
directly followed by a shower scene –, a really crap (on purpose yet still CRAP)
monster, “funny” dialogue that’ll make your ears bleed, and lots of
self-conscious shittiness that lacks the charm that would make it entertaining
or the cleverness that’d make it bearable.

The Devil Complex (2016): Rounding out this trio of films I
never need to see again is this POV horror outing shot in Romania with Romanian
actors directed by a Brit. I do hope everyone planning on watching this likes
shots of the backs of people wandering through snowy woods, because that’s what
half of this is. As the “woods” parts suggests, this is the traditional would-be
Blair Witch Project style of first person horror, just without any
focus, mediocre acting, writing that does seem to try to get away from the
original a little by going the “the supernatural reveals dark secrets” route but
is just too crudely realized to manage anything with it, and disappointing sound
design. It drags, it has about 0.5 interesting scenes, and there’s just
nothing else to say about this thing.

Saturday, September 24, 2016

A bunch of friends are on a road trip. Somewhere in the loneliest part of New
Mexico, they pause at the wrong rest stop. One of the female members of the
group doesn’t return form her personal toilet stop. Her friends, particularly
her boyfriend, are quick to assume she has been kidnapped by the only other
people who were at the rest stop, a quartet of bikers.

So off they go in hot pursuit of the bikers which turns into a Mexican
stand-off. Unfortunately, apart from making some armed hairy (or rather
adorably bewigged) men really angry, the whole thing comes to nothing for our
protagonists, for their friend isn’t loaded into the bikers’ drug
transporter.

Further investigation – and an empty gas tank – lead them to a ghost town,
which will turn out to be the place their friend was taken to. Unfortunately,
it’s populated by a bunch of mute, pillowcase mask-wearing cannibals. To make
matters mildly more complicated, the little altercation earlier wasn’t the last
our heroes will hear of the bikers either.

The Internet really seems to hate Johnny Tabor’s micro-budget Eaters
quite a bit (with the usual bunch of people who clearly don’t watch many
movies declaring it to be the worst horror film evah, or something of the sort);
me, I found myself enjoying the film more than I expected.

Now, Eaters has some obvious problems: the acting is rough around
the edges at best, and often just not terribly good, and its plot certainly is
the sort of thing I’ve seen a couple of dozen times before. However, Tabor is a
pretty effective director. At the very least, Eaters is better paced
than this sort of thing on this sort of budget generally turns out to be,
clearly made by someone who realizes that scenes need to have a function in a
narrative and should end once that function is fulfilled (unless you’re Jess
Franco or somebody else who just doesn’t care about traditional structure at all
and turn this into your personal style).

The pacing’s reasonably effective, and the film generally gets a bit of
mileage out of feeling like one of the lesser, locally produced grindhouse
movies of the 70s, with the desert and the ghost town providing some instant
atmosphere, as do the pillowhead-style of the main baddies, the lack of
explanation for their existence (or really, of what they actually are apart
from cannibals), and direction that usually aims not to be boring.

It’s not the great lost horror masterpiece of 2015 but I think it’s a
perfectly decent film.

Friday, September 23, 2016

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more
glorious Exploder
Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for
the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here
in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or
improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if
you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can
be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Hard-nosed reporter who never does any reporting Inugami (Sonny Chiba) just
happens to be the last of a tribe of werewolves, making him not a ravening beast
at the night (and day) of the full moon, but giving him an old-school
Wolverine-like self-healing ability as well as superhuman strength and agility
on these nights. One non-full moon night, Inugami stumbles over a panicked man
running through the city streets screaming something about a tiger and a girl
named Miki. Before you can say "Very peculiar, Watson", an invisible force rips
the guy to shreds.

That - and the vision of a tiger - is certainly bizarre enough to get Inugami
interested. With the help of his journalist colleague and friend Arai, the
reporter soon discovers that the victim was once part of a rock band known as
the Mobs, four charming guys who raped a singer named Miki Ogata (Nami Etsuko?).
They didn't only do the deed for kicks, but also because their yakuza-controlled
management asked them to, to "teach Miki a lesson".

Now, Miki is a syphilitic junkie singing in strip bars. She's also not
completely sane anymore.

Although he has already had some violent encounters with the yakuza, Inugami
feels driven to save Miki, an idea that will cost his friend Arai's life. It
looks like there's a connection between what has been done to Miki and the
highest strata of Japanese politics, but that turns out to be not very important
for the rest of the movie. Unexpectedly, Miki and Inugami are kidnapped by a
shady government agency that would very much like to build themselves some super
soldiers out of them. Miki is easily controlled through her hatred, but Inugami
isn't even to be convinced by a little vivisection.

When the full moon appears in the sky, he's getting rather cross with his
captors.

For once, a cult film is nearly as awesome as its title promises.
Wolfguy: ER (sorry) is as typical of mid-70s Japanese action cinema as
possible, with all the absurdity and sleaze that promises. The film's archetypal
Japanese action-cinemaness is not much of a surprise when you realize that it
was directed by Kazuhiko Yamaguchi, who had started his career by making a few
girl boss movies in some of Toei's various series of the genre, and then gone on
to become one of the studio's go-to directors for absurd action films with the
Chiba-associated Sister Streetfighter movies, and the Karate
Bullfighter etc series with Chiba.

Now, Yamaguchi was never the most stylish or most controlled of directors.
His films are often more than a little sloppy and are usually held together
through the power of the pure outrageousness of the proceedings in them instead
of strong plotting or narrative. Whenever his films get serious, Yamaguchi
falters. Fortunately, there is not much that is sane or serious about
Wolfguy. Here, Yamaguchi's hectic editing, his rather random love for
inappropriate camera angles and his sudden bursts of cleverness come together to
form a feverish and slightly hallucinatory feeling whole.

This strange, loudly unreal quality of the film is amplified even further by
the randomness of a script that is built in the usual "one scene of dialogue is
followed by one scene of action is followed by one scene of nakedness" style and
does not at all care about how to connect these scenes sensibly. It is a
non-structure that would only lead to tears in a more normal movie, but "normal"
just isn't in the cards for this one. As the oh so wonderful, repetitive Japan
funk that makes up the score will agree.

Wolfguy is the sort of film where the first sex scene contains
blood-licking and verbal approval of Chiba's animalness, the next (nearly)sex
with a syphilitic to prove how trustworthy Chiba is, and the last finds our hero
explaining how sex with his last-minute love-interest reminds him of his mother
and being born. No wonder, with the girl being named after Chiba's mother and
all. Of course, the film plays all this as if it were the most obvious and banal
love scenes, producing additional friction in the audience's (well, my)
brains.

The action scenes are set up in a comparable way, and have an equal love for
the bizarre and unexplained. Why does our hero throw coins with lethal
precision? And, coming to that, why is the government werewolf (who will die of
an allergy to his new werewolf blood) so much hairier than Chiba (who never
transforms into anything)? So many questions, and of course most of them are
never answered at all. How could they when it is quite clear that the film just
makes everything up as it goes along?

That's not a criticism in this particular case, mind you. When a film is so
perfectly fixated on the bizarre, there's just no need for it to try and explain
too much or to try and make sense. If it did, it would just sabotage its
mind-blowing effect, throwing away the purity of its strangeness for something
as boring as plot logic. I certainly wouldn't want that.

Then there's Sonny. Chiba is in his prime here, yet not doing much of the
more subtle acting he always has been capable of when needed, nor going for his
beloved grimacing scenery-chewing and heavy breathing. Instead, Chiba coasts on
his particular brand of charisma and cool. It shouldn't work, or should at least
come over as rather lazy, yet somehow feels like the appropriate way to handle
this particular role, as if the wolfman were a centre of sanity in the insane
world of humanity.

The whole affair is based on a manga I'd just love to read, and possibly the
sequel to 1973's Okami no Monsho aka Crest of the Beast, but
information about both films is difficult to come by and does generally not seem
trustworthy to me. It's a shame, really, because I could use more of this
particular brand of insanity in my life.

Thursday, September 22, 2016

Ken Ma (Sam Lee Chan-Sam) spends his working time as a small time
screenwriter and his free time as an improbable pick-up artist. His life becomes
rather more interesting when he opts for what he thinks is only a one night
stand with air hostess Apple (Lee San-San).

Before he can even blink, he’s Apple’s official boyfriend – and Apple’s not
the kind of girl who’ll let her boyfriend run around trying to sleep with other
women, or indeed one who’ll stop at anything to control him. In fact, first
order of business for her is introducing Ken to her father, triad boss Dragon
(Michael Chan Wai-Man), for photos and fingerprinting, so it’s easier to find
Ken if he leaves the straight and narrow, and needs a corrective loss of a
certain sexual organ ending with “ick”. So clearly, nothing could go wrong with
the romance between our sleazy protagonist and his horrid new girlfriend.

Yet things do become even worse than expected when a Japanese woman
(Seina Kasugai) who always dresses in red and generally introduces herself
ominously as “Yurei, air hostess” steps into Ken’s life and sexes him up right
quick (not that there’s any resistance from his side, mind you). Soon, Ken isn’t
just in trouble with a violent girlfriend and her penis-cutting dad, but also
has to cope with the little fact that “Yurei” is batshit, murderously insane
even for a character in this movie.

If Sam Leong Tak-Sam’s horror comedy The Stewardess is anything, it
certainly is pretty darn weird. I’m not just talking the sort of comedic
weirdness born from a disconnect between Hong Kong concepts of what’s funny and
mine that inevitably leads to stuff flying right over my head. Nor do I just
talk about the eyebrow-raising more common and garden weirdness of a film that
comments on its Chinese protagonist sleeping with a Japanese woman with a
fantasy scene that shows him wearing a military uniform and breaking a Japanese
World War II style battle flag in two over his knee. Rather, I’m talking about
the sort of freeform insanity that can’t help but add some perfectly bizarre
flourish to even the most pedestrian of scenes and concepts, of course – this
being a Hong Kong film – often leaving all sorts of good and proper taste behind
to offend whoever is available – the Japanese, the triads, the mentally ill,
Takashi Miike, its own lead actor and everyone else are all fair game for
whatever dumb idea Leong and co-writer Rikako Suzuki have in any given
moment.

More often than not, Leong presents the general and specific weirdness in a
stylish and slick – yet still batshit - manner that makes parts of the film look
like the love child of a pretty screwy giallo and young Takashi Miike on one of
his milder days. Add to this the outrageous performance by Seina Kasugi, Lam
Suet doing his standard triad guy named Fatty thing, and certainly nobody will
get bored watching The Stewardess.

Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Because her music career and her private life have hit rock bottom because of
violent tragedy, bad luck, and bad decisions, rock musician Nicky Tarot (Leah
Myette) returns to her home city, where she renames herself into Kate Stone and
tries to put the past behind her wholesale. Kate is lent a helping hand by her
artist friend Robyn (Katherine Herrera), the only one of her old buddies who
still wants anything to do with her.

Robyn has inherited a curious apartment building named Blackwood whose
handful of tenants are students and artists, so she provides Kate with an
apartment of her own and a job as the place’s super. Robyn lives in the building
too, so Kate even has a friendly face around.

Unfortunately, Blackwood is not a good home to nurse one’s grief and one’s
guilt in. As soon as she has moved in, Kate is plagued by nightmares, the noise
of wings in the walls, and everything else to keep a woman off balance. Worse
still, the nightmares soon intersect with Kate’s waking world in various
disturbing ways; and Kate might not be the only one living in Blackwood touched
in this way. It is as if the house pushes its tenants to create art – art that
seems to function as a doorway to drag the artist into the cosmic void.

David Schmidt’s House of Black Wings is as fine an example of
micro-budget indie horror, a film that not only feels like a labour of love but
also avoids many of the pitfalls this sort of film can so easily stumble into -
not necessarily because the people involved are lacking in passion or talent but
because they are lacking in experience and funds which very often means a film
only has limited opportunities to correct problems and mistakes.

The only typical indie horror problem House of Black Wings shows is
a certain slowness in the middle, where it might have lost ten minutes or so,
but that’s not a terrible problem for a film to have. It’s also not to be
confused with that micro budget thing where scenes go on and on and on for no
good reason whatsoever – Schmidt knows when to end scenes, and it is clear he
also has a clear picture of why any given scene is part of the narrative. This
may sound like a curious thing to praise but just putting scenes into a film
without any narrative (or atmospheric) reason for them to be there is a problem
you’ll encounter in mainstream horror right now nearly as often as in micro
budget films (whose makers at least have better excuses for this particular
failing), so Schmidt is actually doing a lot better than many of the rich kids
do.

The film’s heart, concerning earnest thoughts about art, guilt and life and
their collision with cosmic horror, isn’t anything you’d find in a more
mainstream film either. It’s the sort of thing that could become rather
pretentious pretty fast, but the way Schmidt film’s plays it, it feels organic
and right, the cosmic horror and the inner struggle of the characters working as
reflections of each other.

And the cosmic horror is fine indeed. There are of course more than just
hints of Lovecraft and other greats of weird fiction running through the movie
but this is not a film in the business of putting the correct nerdy mythos
reference at the forefront, so there’s a decided lack of Cthulhu cults and Iäs
on display. Instead of the most superficial bits and pieces of the weird,
House of Black WIngs opts for its spirit, made visible through some
very original effects work. Well, and quite a few maggots and worms. The film
uses stop motion as well as digital and practical effects, and even includes
some shadow puppet work when Kate reads a wonderful expository children’s book,
most of it shown in short bursts and flashes and demonstrating a degree of
thematic coherence that I wish more films would aim for when presenting the
supernatural.

The acting is on the mark too, with Myette (and Herrera to a degree) carrying
the film quite capably. The film aims for naturalness in most character
interactions, so despite content that would lend itself to stiffness, melodrama,
or just all-around gothiness, things never feel that way. These women are
portrayed as actual believable women, so their run-in with the Outside gains
more weight once it turns their world unnatural.

House of Black Wings really is a wonderful film, full of lovingly
created detail like the shadow puppet bit or Robyn’s doll house from hell, and
even some expertly realized suspense sequences that make great use out of people
crawling between the house’s walls (and what they find there), with some moody
locations and a script that’s thoughtful, never confusing the weird with the
random.

Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Communications to a military uranium mine somewhere in the middle of one of
the US deserts has broken down. For reasons, time is pressing, so Major
Tom McQuade (Cliff DeYoung) can’t wait for appropriate military operatives and
decides to go in with what will be our main protagonists. The film is keeping
things pretty vague there, but our heroes seem to be some sort of repair crew
for hire, wearing black dusters with a little lightning symbol on them.
Though nobody in the costume department could decide if the lightning’s supposed
to be horizontal or vertical. So yes, this is the first film I’ve seen
concerning the adventures of mercenary electricians.

Once our heroes arrive at the mine, scenes from Aliens happen to
them, just with dinosaurs replacing the aliens.

As regular readers know (hi, Mum!), I’m rather fond of low budget specialist
Louis Morneau’s films. However, this doesn’t mean his Corman production
belatedly answering the masses screaming for a sequel to the painful
Carnosaur finds my approval, seeing as I’m not quite stupid enough to
be part of its core audience. Morneau’s direction isn’t really the problem: he
tries his best to make the usual sets look exciting, merrily films around the
problems of the special effects until they look downright solid, and does tend
to film okay monster attacks, making the whole affair mysteriously look like an
actual movie. The true problem is Michael Palmer’s script. It doesn’t so much
crib a bit from Cameron’s Aliens but just reproduces complete scenes.
Which probably must have sounded like a genius idea given that Aliens
is rather good; unfortunately, Carmosaur 2 rips stuff off without any
rhyme or reason, without even the tiniest thought given to questions like if a
scene makes any sense in the somewhat different context it takes place in. The
stuff Palmer comes up with himself neither fits the parts he has ripped off, nor
does it make much sense. Just look at the nature of our heroes, the bizarre
contortions the film goes through to explain why there’s nobody competent
around, and so on, and so forth.

It doesn’t help the film’s case that John Savage just might be the worst
Ripley ever, and that its version of Aliens clearly has no use for
female characters at all. Even the Italian rip-off industry knew better than
this! This – of course – doesn’t mean a boy can’t have a bit of fun with the
film but it’s not the good and clean kind of fun to be sure.

Sunday, September 18, 2016

An archaeological camp in the Great White North of Canada has made
a discovery that could be much more important than anyone could have expected.
Not only do the archaeologists find pottery that looks rather Mesoamerican in
style in the completely wrong part of the continent, predating anything
culturally probable, but also what might be only the upper part of a mysterious
stone structure - a mysterious stone structure dating from a time before humans
actually had a settled lifestyle.

Things start to be going off the rails at about the same time when (one
supposes eminent) archaeologist Professor Piers Olsen (Michael Dickson) arrives
to corroborate the findings up this point. Things start, as they so often do,
with a sacrificed cat, see the local helpers of the dig not leave for home but
instead wander northwards into an arctic frost they’ll most probably not be able
to survive, find all radio contact impossible (it’d be a rather short film
otherwise) and deteriorate further until there’s self-mutilation, suicide,
murder, and visions of a deep-voiced godhood with a deer head.

As anyone who even vaguely knows me will realize, Nick Szostakiwskyj’s
Black Mountain Side pushes a lot of my narrative and thematic buttons,
what with it being a film about a bunch of people isolated in a cold place, the
cosmicist as well as folkloric bent to its horror, the archaeology angle, and so
on, and so forth. Yet still I didn’t really warm to the film (sorry), never
really felt much dread or horror watching it. I didn’t end up actively disliking
the film but rather with the feeling that it misses a chance or two too
many.

Among the film’s main failings is the nearly complete lack of
characterisation, with characters so completely interchangeable, I really
couldn’t find any reason to remember their names. There are very few discernible
character traits on display from anyone apart from stuff like “is the doctor”,
making the characters’ increasing mental dislocation feel rather weightless.
It’s also difficult to see if someone starts acting particularly strange (apart
from visions of deer gods, obviously) when a film doesn’t establish a base line
regarding what’s normal for him. And yes, it’s “him”, for there’s not a single
female character in the film, which is Lovecraftian in all the wrong ways, and
just completely perplexing in a film made in this century.

Szostakiwskyj’s direction style is a bit problematic to my eyes too. Nearly
every scene consists of long, static shots by a mostly immobile camera, from
time to time – if we’re lucky – perhaps one cut-away to another static shot and
then back again. While this sort of thing can add to the tension by giving the
impression of the camera throwing a clinically distanced eye on the characters,
it does also make a tale slowly told like this one feel even slower. In interior
scenes often involving quite a few characters at once, it’s not very interesting
to look at either, and rather than increase the tension, it helps deflate it.
This effect is made worse in more than a few scenes by a tendency to awkwardly
stuff the actors into the frame, positioning them in deeply unnatural ways
that’ll really remind everyone watching this is indeed an indie horror
movie.

On the other hand, this too distanced direction style does reap some
fruits from time to time because most of Black Mountain Side’s violence
and strangeness is filmed in the same flat manner, providing it at times with an
unexpectedly disquieting effect, and once the camera starts moving, it feels
rather surprising and exciting. I’d still argue that making eighty percent of
your film look bland so that the remaining twenty of it can be more effective is
not a terribly economical way to go.

Saturday, September 17, 2016

After paranormal phenomena have driven a family to panicked flight from their
house situated in some so rural it looks like wilderness to this German part of
New Zealand, three paranormal investigators are sent there to find out what’s
what. On first look sceptical – though not so sceptical that it borders on
insanity as many a horror film seems to like a sceptic - scientist Scott
(Jeffrey Thomas), less sceptical scientist Liam (Jed Brophy) and young medium
Holly (Laura Petersen) don’t find too much, but quickly there’s a lot of bumping
going on ever night around every 3am. Holly also sees a very tall and very
threatening man producing these effects.

To make things even more curious, there is one room inside the house that
seems ghost-proof, immune against the tall presence and whatever it brings.

There’s quite a bit to like about Jason Stutter’s ghost house movie The
Dead Room. Obviously, originality is not very big among these things, but
the film does use some interesting variations on standard haunted house
narrative devices. The house this takes place in, for example, is much smaller
than is typical in the genre, clearly not too old either, going against many a
gothic surface trope while still having the same kinds of hauntings you’d
expect going on. Horrors, it turns out, are not exclusively a thing of the most
distant past.

The presentation of the haunting is interesting too. The audience, as do Liam
and Scott, only ever get to see things moving, hear knocks, feel the house
shaking, while only Holly ever is able see the tall man. Stutter’s clearly
following the old adage that the things you can’t see are much more frightening
than those you can, and it works out well for the most part, giving what is on
paper a series of very conventional and tired scares some life. It’s also
something I haven’t seen a film use quite the way The Dead Room does in
a very long time.

In general the film is appropriately moody, using the small location and the
three person main cast expertly, and while there are certainly no particularly
deep characters on display, they are lively and real enough to evoke a degree of
empathy when they get the crap scared out of them; plus, they’re definitely not
annoying, so I never felt myself wishing for anyone’s early death.

Unfortunately, the film pisses away a lot of the goodwill it has produced
when its final ten minutes turn into carnival barker style horror nonsense of
the worst and most well-worn type. It’s probably meant to be the kind of tonal
shift that surprises and shocks the viewer with its audacity, but in practice,
the whole thing feels as tacked on as it is tacky, as if the film’s proper
ending had been replaced with footage from a different, and pretty damn bad,
film.

Friday, September 16, 2016

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more
glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns
for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them
here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or
improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if
you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can
be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

A small town in Maryland is hit by a series of gruesome and inexplicable
murders. Sheriff Cinder (Tom Griffith) is clueless what to do about the problem,
and even if he had an idea, it would probably be difficult for him to set a plan
into action, given that he seems to be fused to his desk and also possibly one
of the walking, moustachioed dead. In a sense, I'm quite glad he loves his desk
so much, because another sex scene featuring him rubbing his moustache about
some poor woman like that nightmarish episode in the later Nightbeast
would probably shatter my sanity for good.

Anyway, the Sheriff knows well that he has no clue and no talent for police
work and would very much like to call the state police on the mass slaughter.
The town's mayor (Richard Dyszel) however, won't hear of it. You see, there's a
large "entertainment complex" (I imagine a very pink bordello) going to be built
on the edge of town, and the mayor doesn't want the investors to get nervous.
I'm sure they prefer a series of unsolved murders to a solved one.

Fortunately, Ben Zachary (Don Leifert) arrives in town, with a moustache as
excellent as that of Cinder and carrying a bag full of gadgets. Zachary purports
to work for a nearby observatory and also to be something of an expert in
strange things, following a fallen meteorite into town. He'd just love to solve
the murders for the mayor while he's at it.

Zachary quickly finds out that the killings are carried out by a trio of
malevolent aliens who have escaped from a crashed interplanetary zoo transport,
and he knows astonishingly well what to do against them. One could begin to
think the observatory worker has a completely surprising secret of his own.

But can one exceedingly hairy man stand alone against the power of Lame
Insect Guy, the Abominable Stiltman and Coloured Spot That Moonlights As A
See-Through Lizard Monster?

The Alien Factor is the first film directed by the singular Don
Dohler, Baltimore's king of dubious yet charming monster movies. Not
surprisingly, his debut film presents itself with all the flaws Dohler's later
movies would continue to show.

Throughout, The Alien Factor tests its audience's patience with the
slowest imaginable pacing, created by Dohler's tendency to fill out his movies'
running time with long and pointless sequences of boring and rather ugly people
doing nothing of interest or relevance, and doing it very very slowly.

The film isn't exactly getting more thrilling through the peculiar way acting
is practiced on planet Dohler. Nobody on screen seems to have a clue how human
beings speak, move or look, and so each and every one of the actors has decided
to imitate a different object or animal. Dyszel, for example, reminds me of
nothing so much as of an excitable dog in a suit, while Griffith prefers the
immobility of his beloved desk. The latter is quite understandable, because one
can't help but notice in Griffith's regular downward looks that his dialogue is
lying on the desk before him. That thing is a regular life saver, if Griffith
does in fact possess a life to be saved. Of course, acting this singularly
peculiar might not make a film more believable, yet it can't help but amuse.

The only exception from the rule of bad acting is Don Leifert, who always was
one of the more talented participants in Dohler's films. I'm not talking about
great acting here, but Leifert does possess at least a little charisma and
screen presence and does not talk like a broken robot.

Dohler's direction is not exactly masterful either, but for something that
was made by a group of people in Baltimore, on an absurd budget and with little
experience in commercial filmmaking, The Alien Factor is quite nice to
look at. Dohler is obviously a point and shoot guy at heart, he does however
usually manage to keep his camera pointed in the right direction. From time to
time, scenes are even filmed from more than one camera angle, which might not
sound exciting if you're not acquainted with many products of regional
filmmaking, but is far from a matter of course in films like this, usually for
budgetary reasons.

Dohler might not be visually ambitious (I suspect his ideal SF movie was made
in the 50s, in the US), yet he genuinely seems to care about making a watchable
movie. While a lot of what we see on screen is pretty boring, Dohler achieves
some moody or effective shots from time to time, probably through pure
bloody-mindedness more than anything else.

Bloody-mindedness is also what comes to mind when looking at the monsters -
three creatures designed with obvious care and enthusiasm and utterly
ridiculous, yet ridiculous in a way that speaks of love and the willingness to
do stupid things when those stupid things help to get a movie made.

Later Dohler epics would go on to feature a lot of local colour, granting a
look into a provincial life that is five to ten years behind what is going on in
the cities and imbuing the films with a peculiar charm that is the saving grace
of many a local film production of its time. The Alien Factor isn't
quite there yet - there's a bit of frightening fashion and ugly living rooms to
gawk at, but not as many of the bizarre local characters doing things that might
be edgy or funny when you're living in the less exciting parts of the country.
Where the later films are set in bizarro Maryland, this one takes place in a
more generic small town USA, the fact that Sheriff Cinder and some of the other
characters would return in the very Maryland Nighbeast
notwithstanding.

Dohler's later films would also feature a bit more gore and (if you want to
call it that) sex, the former quite helpful in keeping the viewer awake, the
latter the thing nightmares are made off. The Alien Factor for its part
seems largely satisfied with displaying the amount of violence and sexuality of
your typical 50s monster film.

All this might sound like The Alien Factor should be a rather dreary
and boring experience hardly even fit to laugh at, but I find the film much too
enthusiastic in its imitation of the structures of its models from the 50s and
too determined to be an actual movie like those old ones were - even if neither
the money nor the experience are there - to do anything else but love it a
little bit.

It's true, I found myself laughing while watching the poor guy in the stilt
suit trying to keep his balance while threatening the most wooden actors on the
planet, or seeing Leifert wrestle with the See-Through Lizard, but I wasn't
laughing about them, or Dohler, I was laughing with them about the strange roads
to which this moviemaking lark can lead the people making them.

Thursday, September 15, 2016

Their network side producer presses the boys and girls of Scare Campaign, an
Australian network TV horror-themed prank show that has already gone one step
too far during their last production if you rightly believe actress and obvious
horror film heroine Emma (Meegan Warner), into making an even more sensational
and “real” final episode for their fifth season. The kids today, we are
informed, are all into an Internet snuff show named Chekhov’s
GunMasked Freaks, where people wearing 2010s horror movie masks murder
victims with the hardware store stock they’ve strapped to their cameras, and
while real murder is (alas, the producer clearly thinks) still off the table,
things in Scare Campaign need to become rather different if the show wants to
stay on air.

To nobody’s surprise, this season finale might just turn out to be the series
finale for lack of warm bodies in the next one.

While Scare Campaigns certainly isn’t a bad way to waste eighty
minutes of one’s life, watching it mostly provoked some thoughts about plot
twists, or rather, about how difficult getting them right truly is. On one hand,
if you don’t play fair with the audience and drop some random crap at them that
doesn’t fit into what they’ve seen before, your plot will feel arbitrary and
pointless. If, on the other hand you play as fair as Cameron and Colin Cairnes’s
film does, you risk becoming too obvious, annoying an even just mildly
genre-savvy viewer because they’ll know exactly what will happen. Scare
Campaign certainly falls too far into the second camp, not so much playing
fair with its audience than pointing it quite openly at what’s going on.

Which can still work in a film that has much else going on beyond its plot,
but Scare Campaign is a very straightforward horror thriller whose only
claim to subtext is some clichéd rambling by the chief “Masked Freak” about The
New Media that really isn’t leading anywhere. Targets, this is not.

Still, the film is technically competent, and perfectly watchable. It’s just
nothing more than that.

Wednesday, September 14, 2016

The decaying town of Mescal in the Old West has a problem. This time, it’s
not a conflict between ranchers and farmers. Instead, a series of murders has
the place in its grip. First, someone knifed the son of the town-founding,
ambiguously-named Mescal family, and now, probably the same killer spends his
valuable free time murdering the local prostitutes. The town’s bourgeoisie calls
in independent (none of that Pinkerton business for this town, and good on them)
investigator Edward Burns (Jeff Cooper) from the Big City.

Once he’s on the case, Burns will not just have to solve a difficult and
somewhat bizarre series of murders, he’ll also have to come to some kind of
understanding with the local sheriff Jarod (Jack Elam, described in an early
dialogue line as “a two-fisted bear of a man”, on which I couldn’t possible
comment). Jarod’s not well-loved by his community: he’s old, his style of
policing is a relic of supposedly simpler times, he’s frankly on the ugly side,
probably doesn’t wash too regularly, and certainly doesn’t know how to conduct a
police investigation. He’s also understandably angry about the changing times
and the big-haired know-it-all detective romping through his town.

Even if one does not have anything good to say about Larry G. Spangler’s
A Knife for the Ladies, beyond congratulating it for the bad pun in its
title, one can’t help but admire the uncommon genre mix it is aiming for.
Mystery western aren’t exactly common, especially not on screen, and one taking
the cues for its mystery (and style of title, if we ignore the pun) from the
giallo is even more unique. Of course, having a clever saleable idea for mixing
genres and actually being able to actually mix them are somewhat different
things.

At the very least, Spangler does give it an honest try, in an
ambitious move turning the genre mix via the conflict between Burns and
Jarrod into an actual part of the narrative (that’ll of course be resolved by
the guys having a fistfight, the only kind of bodily contact these manly men are
allowed to have), and he’s also clearly making an effort constructing an actual
mystery that somewhat fits into the last breath of the Old West. The film’s not
as clever about it all as I’d have wished – the dialogue is clunky and often
more so thanks to clearly overextended actors in the smaller roles, and while
the plot’s mix of Western, mystery and giallo generally stays interesting, it is
not terribly exciting, and doesn’t lead too far into unexplored territory.

Spangler’s direction is perfectly okay for this sort of local production.
Again, you can see the guy makes a very earnest effort that’s definitely good
enough to be called solid, with editing, transitions, and camera work that are
perfectly functional but which never really become quite as convincing a
whole as I’d have wished for.

Jack Elam, character actor in more Western as one should care to count, seems
to have a lot of fun with for once not playing the drunk deputy or something on
that level but actually being the lead, playing the very typical Western role of
the sheriff whose own aging and the changes of the world around him lead him
into existential troubles he can only cope with by drinking too much and
punching people. It’s certainly not the most subtle portrayal of this sort of
thing I’ve seen (but then, neither is the way it is written), but I found
it quite a joy to see Elam getting his well-deserved due in this way. He’s
certainly acting circles around Cooper, who has very interesting hair and is
quite the glowerer but is rather on the stiff side. Which is too bad, for some
kind of intense, Old West Sherlock Holmes battling it out with Elam would
certainly have been something to see.

If all this doesn’t sound like a very good movie, that impression is
certainly not wrong. However, A Knife for the Ladies is a film with
quite a few interesting ideas, made with earnestness and a degree of competence
that certainly never left me bored. Add to that the joy of seeing Jack Elam
stretching his legs a little, and I wouldn’t have missed seeing Spangler’s film
for the world.

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

At times, Scott Wiper’s film is as tight as a WWE production featuring a
meathead wrestler in a Battle Royale/Hunger Games variation
can possible be.

It suffers from a handful of things, though: First, there’s the fact that
said meathead wrestler is Steve Austin, a guy who is slightly more likeable than
Vinnie Jones, the least likeable guy in cheap action movies alive, who is consequently one of the main bad guys here, can’t act to
save his life, and is generally to slow and immobile to be all that great in his
action scenes. At least, Austin doesn’t get on of his patented “America, fuck
yeah” speeches in here, so that’s a plus.

The film makes up for that supposed lack with hilariously hypocritical scenes
telling us that cheering on violence is bad while making us cheer on violence,
which a cleverer film would probably have broken with a bit of irony, and an
even more clever film doubled down on via actual characterisation instead of
speechifying. That “show, don’t tell” thing one might have heard about when one
writes screenplays, and all that.

Speaking of the violence, it’s generally more on the brutal and nasty side
(avoiding the problem of having to make guys like Austin and Jones look elegant
or fast), a bit too rapey for my tastes, and often still actually pretty
exciting. Unless Wiper suddenly starts to let the camera wobble in vague
circles, letting it pop off for a shot of the in-film camera looking down on the
characters, pretending shaking the camera gives the action weight and showing a
camera gives it meaning. Now that I think about it, it is rather
adorable…

If someone would cut about half an hour of footage, this would be a pretty
great action film, if a rather nasty one. Alas, as it stands, it wildly
fluctuates in tone and tempo, spends too much time one subplots without a payoff
(like the FBI guy whose influence on the actual plot is exactly zero), and is
dreadful as often as it is fun.

Sunday, September 11, 2016

American pickpocket in Paris Michael Mason (Richard Madden) steals the wrong
bag when he takes one belonging to Zoe Naville (Charlotte Le Bon), for Zoe’s bag
contained a time bomb she was just about to wander off with and throw into the
Seine. Initially, she was supposed to deposit it in the office of a
racist French nationalist party the film is too polite to name but when she
realized said office wouldn’t be empty as promised by the boyfriend who
convinced her of the whole thing, she changed her plans.

Michael’s inadvertent intervention ends with four dead bodies, an anonymous
message that promises more violence of this sort to come on Bastille Day, and
him hunted as the responsible party. Before the French can identify him, the CIA
does. And because this is the CIA, they don’t give this rather important
information to their allies – because then they’d have to explain why they have
access to surveillance cameras all over Paris – but send out reckless, violent,
and nearly disgraced agent Briar (Idris Elba) to illegally detain Michael for a
day to torture as much information out of him as possible. Briar might be a bit
of a thug, but he’s also not stupid, and he quickly realizes that Michael isn’t
responsible for any bombings. In fact, the whole thing will start to look to him
like something quite different from terrorism and only the beginning of a
series of provocations set to use the fissures in French society to throw Paris
into chaos for rather more petty reasons. Briar, once he’s got a whiff of what’s
really going on, will stop at little to get to the truth and the people
responsible, even if it means teaming up with a pickpocket and a woman who
nearly did something deeply stupid and most certainly highly illegal.

I found James Watkins’s Bastille Day a surprisingly fun film. I’m
generally quite sceptical about the slow but steady trickle of international
productions seemingly following the lead of Luc Besson’s Europacorp in style and
content. However unlike quite a few of these films as well as much of the actual
Europacorp output, this one’s actually a neat little addition to the action and
thriller genres.

It is even not completely stupid. Sure, the film’s attempt to include the
influence of social media and the spread of information as parts of its plot is
an interesting idea not very intelligently realized, and the bad guys’ plan has
certain shades of the first Die Hard movie with Paris as the
skyscraper, and obviously never reads as something that would actually work this
way exactly the way they want it, given its dependence of large masses of people
acting exactly like they want thanks to the magical power of hashtags, a
mysterious Internet thing I’m not terribly sure the scriptwriters have
actually encountered in the wild. However, as action movie background guff
needed to get the violence and the chases rolling goes, this passes muster quite
decently. And hey, while this isn’t a meditation about the worst sides of online
culture trickling into the real world, or a film that has something clever to
say about mass manipulation, the film’s background is rather more interesting
than the usual “Idris Elba shoots the evil terrorists”, and at least tries to
use elements of the real world. There’s also the little fact that the film uses
its implausible plot with an impeccable sense for the kind of rhythm – which is
what the thriller genre, with an emphasis on action like this one has or not, is
all about - this sort of thing is supposed to have.

Watkins again turns in a not terribly charismatic but effective direction
job, generally following the philosophy that action films are supposed to be
edited in a way that enables the audience to follow what’s going on in them and
doing a good job with that. The action isn’t exactly realistic in feel
but also not terribly over the top, aiming for a middle of the road approach
that works quite well for the film.

Idris Elba is an actor you could actually imagine to be physically capable of
the stuff he’s doing here. Elba doesn’t, of course and alas, need to strain his
considerable acting talents here much, for Briar is a pretty empty vessel; the
film doesn’t even make much use of the mistake that brought him to Paris nor
does it ever show any interest in explaining who its protagonist actually is
apart from slightly insane and exceedingly violent. So all Elba has to go on is
his physical presence, which is fortunately also considerable.

All in all, this is bread and butter action thriller stuff done right, even
though it’s certainly not a classic of the genre.

Saturday, September 10, 2016

Parker (Lindsay Farris) has lost his young son to illness, ending up not only
with a dead child but also a marriage in its last throes and a six figure
hospital debt. So he takes on a surveillance job that looks even more shady than
this sort of thing generally is.

Parker is to move into the run down building across from his surveillance
subject, a woman whom he initially only knows as Subject 1 (Stephanie King), and
observe her from there for a few days. He has no idea why he is
supposed to watch the woman, nor what he can expect to happen. Some research
shows her name is Tennneal, that she works in some kind of research institute
she never seems to actually visit, and that her potentially abusive boyfriend
(Tom O’Sullivan) is the youngest member of a once politically influential family
whose star dimmed after the mysterious death of one of their employees.

Something doesn’t feel right about the whole affair, and the longer Parker
stays on his post, the more peculiar his surroundings become: there are strange
noises, disturbing dreams, small wounds that won’t heal, and worse things to
come. Of course, given his personal situation, Parker might just have a bit of a
breakdown; or something very different indeed might be going on.

Given the consciously obscure way Joseph Sims-Dennett’s
Observance operates for most of its running time, with symbols and
scenes that usually lend themselves to more than just one interpretation, it
will come as no surprise that the answer what really is going on here is an
ambiguous one. Watching the film, I did at times feel rather lost, as Parker
does, never quite grasping everything that was going on, nor exactly what it
might all mean. To me, that’s not a bad thing but rather one of the film’s
attractions; I can see a different type of viewer becoming quite annoyed by this
approach, even though a change of perspective late on in the film does suggest a
direction where the “truth” of the film’s fiction can probably be found.

Whatever the exact meaning of the film is – and even the question if it
is psychological or supernatural horror is a question of interpretation –
there’s quite a bit else going on here that’s exciting. With simple methods
Sims-Dennett creates a disquieting mood that isn’t based on shock effects –
though there are some of these too – but on small shifts in environments and
sounds, purposefully confusing edits, and visual symbols that have something at
once archetypal and ambiguous. The film creates a sense of claustrophobia and
increasing wrongness I found pretty hypnotic, all the more so thanks to an
appropriately disturbing performance by Farris who has to carry about
eighty-five minutes of the film and does so wonderfully.

Friday, September 9, 2016

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more
glorious Exploder
Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for
the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here
in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or
improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if
you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can
be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

After some carnival impresario-like mugging of our host (and director and
producer) William Castle, the film introduces its hero. Sir Robert Cargrave
(Ronald Lewis) is a successful Victorian physician and specialist in the
treatment of paralysis.

Unexpectedly, Cargrave receives a letter written by the love of his youth,
Maude (Audrey Dalton), who would have become his wife if not for a greedy father
without the proper faith in Cargrave's future career. Maude is now married to a
certain Baron Sardonicus and lives in one of those imaginary Central European
countries full of people with utterly incongruous accents I know and love from
dozens of other movies.

In her letter, Maude invites Cargrave to her husband's estate, but gives the
invitation an urgent undertone that convinces the physician to close his
practice at once and run off to the continent. Why, one could think he is still
in love with Maud.

In Europe, the good doctor soon notices some peculiarities. The local
citizenry fears his host as if he were Dracula himself, and it doesn't take too
long of an acquaintance with the Baron's lifestyle to understand why. It's the
usual combination of gothic ghastliness - a sinister servant, Krall, (Oskar
Homolka), a permanently locked door, the total absence of mirrors in the house,
experiments with leeches on the house maid. And those are the things Cargrave
experiences before he finally meets Sardonicus himself (Guy Rolfe). Sardonicus
is a very unpleasant man with the peculiar habit of hiding his face behind a
waxen mask and with more than a whiff of the sadist about him, as the screeching
town girls he likes to secretly entertain will agree.

There's a good reason for the Baron wearing a mask, though. His face is
disfigured, paralysed in a permanent deathly grin he acquired when he robbed his
father's grave of the lottery ticket that bought him his title. Obviously,
Sardonicus needs Cargrave's help, and he is willing to threaten his own wife to
get it.

Given that Mr. Sardonicus is a William Castle production, it is
self-evident that it has a gimmick every carnie barker would be proud of. When
the movie made its initial matinee run, cards picturing a hand showing thumbs up
or down were distributed in the audience. At a certain point shortly before the
end, Castle appears on screen again, asking the audience to vote if poor old
Sardonicus is in need of further punishment by presenting the appropriately
positioned thumb to him. After a gleeful pretence at counting the votes, the
audience then is presented with the film's only existing ending, which is of
course the "more punishment" one. There are rumours that a more redemptive
ending does actually exist but is now lost, but the way Castle's counting scene
is set up alone should make clear that there's just no chance for that; if you
think otherwise after having watched the film, I have a nice bridge to sell
you.

It's not my favourite Castle gimmick - that would be the ones in The
Tingler - it does however give the film a gleeful charm that helps loosen
up its sometimes a bit talky proceedings.

That doesn't mean the gimmick is the movie's only virtue. Probably inspired
by the success of that other great cheapskate director/producer Roger Corman's
House of Usher, Castle makes a trip into gothic horror, a field he
usually didn't work in. There are a few differences between the two films'
approaches to their sub-genre, though, and certainly one in quality and artistic
vision, the latter just not a thing very close to Castle's heart. The most
important difference, however, is that Corman uses colour - or rather COLOUR! -
where Castle makes a black and white film (although I doubt this was anything
other than a budgetary decision). Corman's film is very much screaming "new
Gothic" through this alone, while Sardonicus looks much more like
Castle is going for a continuation of the visual language of the classic
Universal horror film, although with the addition of open sadism and relatively
daring content most of its old brethren just couldn't get away with. There's an
emphasis on stylish but cheap artificiality in the sets that looks to me very
much like the Universal style without the verticality of the sets the older
films could afford. I'm a firm believer in artificiality as a stylistic element
in films as long as the artificiality serves the building of mood, as it does
here, so I found this part of Sardonicus quite satisfying.

The film's photography is equally moody and satisfying and at times
unexpectedly beautiful, again showing the influence of early Universal and the
cheap semi-noirs Castle started his career with, albeit with less emphasis on
shadows, and more on sharp contrasts and interesting framing.

Not as satisfying are the more sensationalist moments, not because I have any
ethical problems with them (which would come as a surprise, wouldn't it?), but
because they don't really agree with the film's more subtle aspects. The more of
Castle's films I have seen, the more I come to the conviction that the man
should have trusted in his own ability to be subtle from time to time, even if
he (probably rightfully so) believed his kid audience to be averse to subtlety.
On the plus side, Castle's lack of restraint grants the viewer moments of
silliness like the beloved flying head dream sequences you'd usually connect
with cartoons.

As is often the case with Castle's films, there are also some quite memorable
dialogue scenes that present a sharpness and a cynical view of humanity you
don't usually expect to find in exploitation films aimed at teenagers. Ray
Russell's script (based on his own novella) is particularly interesting,
building a castle made of classical Gothic tropes, cheap Freudianism, extreme
but thematically fitting psychology and dialogue that is a bit stiff but deeper
than it strictly needs to be. One could criticise that there isn't much
happening in the film, but gothic horror is all about mood and theme, with
little need for plot or action beyond having everything go to pieces in the
end.

The acting is also pretty good, with Ronald Lewis giving (and that might very
well be a first) a sympathetic and even vaguely charismatic hero in a sub-genre
that usually has no time or interest for making its heroes memorable, Guy Rolfe
granting his Sardonicus just the right mixture of sadism, sarcasm, desperation
and even a bit of humanity and Oskar Homolka relishing the opportunity to lay it
on really thick as the sinister factotum.

Audrey Dalton on the other hand seems to struggle with most of her dialogue
and is never able to make Maude an actual human being.

All in all, Mr. Sardonicus is one of the better films in Castle's
filmography, especially for people with an interest in Gothic horror beyond the
initial Universal wave, Corman and Bava.

Thursday, September 8, 2016

Soldiers of Fortune (2012): Despite a perfectly great
idiotic action movie plot idea about rich people getting their kicks in a
warzone, and an absurdly overqualified cast including Christian Slater, Sean
Bean, Ving Rhames, Dominic Monaghan, James Cromwell and Colm Meaney, this is not
the joyful return of Cannon-size action cinema dumbness. Instead, this is one of
those action films that thinks it is a good idea to keep all its better action
sequences for the final twenty minutes or so, instead trusting on bad
characterisation and boring back and forth to keep its audience awake. Director
Maxim Korostyshevsky does at least make the film look slick but he never really
goes all out on the kind of crazy a film needs if it wants to sell Slater as a
former special forces operative or Meaney as his evil nemesis. It’s all much too
blandly realized for how stupid it is, making neither that part of its audience
happy that might have gone in expecting a serious action film, nor those (like
me) expecting entertaining crap.

The Bishop Murder Case (1930): The only Philo Vance
adaptation starring Basil Rathbone (quite a few years before he became the
iconic Holmes with the worst of all possible Watsons) falls into the difficult
time period when most Hollywood filmmaking was still very much transitioning
into sound film. Consequently, half of the actors involved mug like your worst
idea of silent movie acting, others shout as if everyone around them were deaf,
while only one third of the cast – thankfully including most of the major
players – has already assumed the more workable idea of screenacting that would
dominate screens for the next fifteen, twenty years. That’s a liveable enough
quota, but unfortunately, directors David Burton and Nick Grinde fall into that
early – and quite avoidable – talkie style of stiff, unimaginative visuals full
of characters set up into stiff, unnatural tableaus, declaiming much of what
they have to say visibly into the direction of the camera. The mystery at the
film’s core is actually pretty okay if you like this sort of thing but thanks to
the visual blandness and the general sluggishness of the affair, using the word
“entertaining” to describe the film would be rather too much unless you are a
much more patient soul than I am.

I’d say it might still be interesting for historical reasons, but then there
are early talkies in the genre that are actually fun too watch, so why not watch
one of them instead?

The Legend of Barney Thomson (2015): Robert Carlyle’s debut
as a feature film director – he does take on the title role too – is rather fun
if you like Douglas Lindsay’s source novel (and sequels), like our humour on the
macabre side, or just want to hear people say all those dulcet sounding curses
the Scottish are known and loved for. It also happens to be rather
funny, showing off Emma Thompson and Carlyle himself in particularly good form.
The film does a lot of clever stuff with the quotidian grotesque (Scottish
gothic?) and uses stereotypes in a way that’s actually funny instead of
lazy.

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

In Push’s world, there exists an international underground of people
with various psychic powers, reaching from telekinetics to people who can scream
really unpleasantly, from people with mind control powers to various types of
clairvoyants. Many of them are controlled – willingly or not – by various
government agencies, though the film is a little ambiguous regarding how much
control these agencies actually employ about the powered.

We do learn quickly enough that the American organization concerned with this
– led by one Henry Carver (Djimon Hounsou) – is rather evil, what with them
doing human experiments and murdering the father of what will be our
protagonist. And that just after Dad has given him what very much sounds like
the beginning of a chosen one prophecy it’s not really turning out to be!

At the start of the film’s main plot, said protagonist Nick Gant has all
grown up to be played by Chris Evans, and is trying to keep something of a low
profile in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, it’s not quite as low as he imagined it to
be, for the Division knows exactly where he lives and which triad he’s owing
money to - they clearly just don’t see him as much of a potential threat. So
when a suitcase containing a rather important substance makes its way to Hong
Kong carried by a woman we will later learn is Nick’s ex-girlfriend Kira
(Camilla Belle), a couple of Division agents come sniffing around his apartment,
threaten him a bit, and leave. Nick’s just about to go on the run when another
visitor comes in. This time it’s teenage pre-cog (“watcher” in the film’s
terminology) Cassie (Dakota Fanning). Cassie is – for various and complicated
reasons – after the same thing as the Division agents and really wants Nick’s
help.

Eventually, they team-up and become involved in various plots and
counter-plots that also involve some Chinese operatives with a much better
watcher than Cassie is (Li Xia-Lu). At least, they’ll be able to team up with a
handful of other independents with middling super powers (Ming-Na Wen, Cliff
Curtis and Nate Mooney).

Paul McGuigan’s Push seems to be what happens when someone imagines
the X-Men by way of the European post-Bourne spy film with visible influences
reaching from classic heist flicks to – appropriately enough - Hong Kong cinema.
That might sound a bit like a high concept mess, but in fact, the resulting
movie is pretty great. Push is surprisingly excellent at finding the
point where the genres and influences it is working from coalesce, making it all
feel much more organic than I would have expected.

I’m particularly fond of the way David Bourla’s script plays with genre
expectations, often diverting from the tropes of one genre to that of the next
one to surprise the audience and even subvert the usual plot beats a bit. An
example is the way the prologue and the first act suggest that this is going to
be a Chosen One tale with Nick as its Chosen, when the film instead turns out to
be about a handful of characters who are all down on their luck one way or the
other trying to do some good in a world that has stacked all cards against them,
with Nick honestly not being particularly special.

Even our heroes’ super powers aren’t terribly impressive: Nick loses
practically every fight he gets in, Cassie is a much less precise and clear
pre-cog than her Chinese counterpart - not to speak of the things her mother
could do - and their friends have powers of very limited applicability. Only
Kira’s actually dangerous in that regard, though she’s a rather ambiguous
character, and not just because the film is pretty good at showing how horrible
the things her mind control powers do to her victims actually are.

Push does particularly well with the surreal and strange parts of
its world, really making its audience feel the strangeness of a place where
characters try to find a way through to a half-knowable yet always shifting
future, where what you think who you are might not be true because someone might
just have literally put your past in your head. There’s often something
appropriately hallucinatory to McGuigan’s direction, his characters moving
through a world that feels just ever so slightly off yet at the same time
hyper-real.

In this regard, the director makes perfect use of Hong Kong locations that
look and feel like strange, neon and candy-coloured pieces of a slightly
mad near future, at once absolutely real and knowable yet ever so slightly
disquieting and off. Which might sound like exoticism but seems to speak to the
nature of actual Hong Kong as the dream of a very peculiar futurist, something
it seems to share with Tokyos, real and imagined.

There’s quite a bit of interesting thematic work going on in the background
here, too, with more than just one character having to carry the burdens as well
as the hopes of their parents generation, with some of these burdens rather
cruel, some inevitable, some very much imagined and some kinder as they seem.
The film doesn’t really fall into the trap of simplifying this either, with what
we can glean of the motivations of the absent parents mostly as complex as that
of actual parents. Like it is with the future in Push’s world, things
are complicated, ambiguous, and generally not as clear and easy they seem.

Which of course all fits neatly into the superpowered spy/heist film tale the
film tells, suggesting a surprising amount of care and thought having gone into
the writing. Why, the film even largely manages to keep this up throughout its
final act, even though there’s a bit of angling for a sequel that will never
come. The film’s action is rather on the excellent side, too – varied, inspired
by Hong Kong cinema yet not aping it, and taking place in diverse and
interesting environments.

There are quite a few other small touches I love about the film: there’s
the number of character actors from Hong Kong popping up everywhere (the film’s
thanking Johnnie To’s Milkyway as their local co-operator for a reason), the
imaginative and telling way even the same power works differently here for
different people, the film’s love for people who aren’t born to be heroes and
still do their best, the various wry nods at pop-cultural touchstones, the
general quality of the cast, and quite a bit more.

Clearly, I have a bit of a crush on Push, and why not? It certainly
deserves it.

Tuesday, September 6, 2016

On the Spanish Main, when the pirates of the Tortugas ruled the waves. Poor
Spanish Commander Luis Monterrey (Lex Barker)! Commissioned by the crown to
finally get a load of silver from Santa Cruz back to Spain – none of the other
deliveries ever reached their goal – he finds himself outwitted and outgunned by
the Tortuga-based pirates of evil Captain Olonese (Livio Lorenzon) who for some
reason knows quite well the cotton the good commander has supposedly loaded is
actually silver. Also add to our hero’s trouble his puzzling infatuation with
Isabela (Estalla Blain), the unpleasant, classist and generally unkind niece of
Santa Cruz’s governor who’d never get together with a peasant like him
anyway.

During a hilarious process, Monterrey is sentenced for losing the gold as a
traitor to a life of hard labour. While on the way to the penal colony,
Monterrey and a few of his fellow prisoners manage to take control of their
prison ship. What’s a man to do than to grab himself an eye patch, dub himself
Captain Nobody, and sail off to Tortuga to become a pirate too?

Domenico Paolella’s Pirates of the Coast isn’t one of the treasures
of Italian pirate films, for it is a bit lacking in charisma to be truly
riveting. Lex Barker is a bit too wooden to make for a proper swashbuckling
hero, and Luis’s character lacks any of the larger than life elements a good
swashbuckling hero needs. Well, he’s certainly honourable enough but that’s it
as far as his character traits go. The rest of the characters suffer from the
same problem too, with nary anything distinctive between them. I’m not
necessarily talking about character depth, mind you – what the film really needs
is more character colour. Only Olonese is appropriately slimy and evil,
Lorenzon consequently having a hard time to liven things up a bit when the rest
of the cast isn’t playing.

On the plus side, this one seems to have had a bit more of a budget than
usual in Italian swashbucklers, so we get some mildly exciting sea battles, mass
battles that have more then three participants and some okay fencing duels
(though I’ve seen much better, and not just in US movies). At least, the film’s
certainly not shirking its duty of providing the audience with most of the
mandatory types of action one can expect from a pirate movie.

Sunday, September 4, 2016

Father Kim (Kim Yoon-seok), has been the Catholic Church’s exorcist in South
Korea and the local man of a vague Rosicrucian cabal inside the Vatican that
seems to concern itself with particularly evil demons or something ever since
the priest he assisted fell into a coma. Not that Kim’s Korean superiors
actually want to have much to do with him, mind you: they loathe him, and all
the help they might give him is strictly unofficial and certainly happening
under duress. For the last six months or so, Kim has attempted to exorcise
teenager Yeong-sin (Park So-dam) who has something particularly bad dwelling
inside of her. After the girl survived a suicide attempt, Kim’s work has come
under a degree of public scrutiny too, with his superiors denying
everything.

The man and the work are also chewing up assistants left and right. The
newest candidate is young Deacon Choi (Kang Dong-won), our viewpoint
character, who just might turn out to be a born exorcist, though he doesn’t
exactly seem to be the ideal priest. Kim will dearly need Choi in the battle to
come.

If you’re like me and have grown bored of US exorcism films at about the time
of The Exorcist, Jang Jae-hyeon’s debut film just might make you a
happier and less bored person. Not because it is a terribly effective horror
film: in fact, there’s little horrific happening until about the halfway mark,
and what happens then really isn’t terribly effective. In fact, the film spends
more time on Choi finding out the plot’s basics and getting involved with a lot
of things that won’t be of much import later – be it the Rosicrucian stuff or
the distrust his superiors have of Kim – than get on with exorcism business.
Indeed, speaking of the film having much of a plot beyond “exorcism” and “young
priest pretty randomly finding his calling” would be saying too much to a nearly
absurd degree.

However, the film’s treatment of the Catholic faith, exorcism and all things
theological, wildly mixing up western and Korean spiritual, theological and
imaginary concepts in a way that becomes increasingly and
delightfully bonkers makes up for pretty much all of its failings – and it’s not
just the Rosicrucian catholic exorcists watching out for demons they call “the
twelve manifestations” that’ll delight and astonish. For example, there’s that
wonderful moment when our priestly heroes spray themselves with what the
subtitles call “female secretions”, because apparently, demons don’t really work
with the females of the species. Consequently, Yeong-sin’s possession is some
kind of accident, and the demon inhabiting her would really rather like to hop
into a much more useful male; we don’t know the demon’s position regarding trans
people. We also learn that exorcists needs to be born in the year of the tiger –
which is certainly a little known part of Catholic doctrine. But then, our
heroes will make up for that little lapse in doctrine by getting the Vatican to
mail them The Holy Bell of Saint Francis of Assisi, which quite obviously gives
them +5 on spiritual attack rolls against demons.

Demons, by the way, are easiest detected by putting a horde of kittens into
the potentially possessed’s bedroom and watching what happens; the best exorcism
soundtrack is Bach. All this is the little stuff, though – as you know, the goal
of every decent exorcism is to transfer the demon into a piglet, which will then
turn black and make demon noises, while some hapless priest has exactly one hour
to drown it in a river at least 15 metres wide.

Yes, Virginia, this does indeed mean that The Priests' dramatic –and
played in a tone of utmost seriousness for this is certainly not meant
as a comedy - finale sees Choi hunted by the police, running around with a devil
piglet in his arms, and trying to reach the nearest river while said devil
piglet causes absurd traffic accidents, blocks taxi doors, and looks absolutely
adorable while making demon piglet noises. If one of cinema’s noblest goals is
to show an audience things it hasn’t seen before, the film certainly is a
triumph. I, for one, found myself stunned, awed, confused and highly amused
watching it.

Saturday, September 3, 2016

It’s 1990, and Scanners-style psychokinetic powers are a thing in
the population. Rambling psychokinetic Zack (Graham Skipper) is lured into the
private, secret, and deeply dubious psi research program of Dr. Slovak (John
Speredakos, increasingly – and rather wonderfully - chewing the scenery) with
the promise of seeing his old flame Rachel (Lauren Ashley Carter) – also a
psychokinetic and in the research program – again. Turns out Slovak is a bit of
a liar, for while Rachel is indeed in the program – and is now motivated with an
opportunity for seeing Zack again as he is the other way around – Slovak clearly
(and for only vague reasons) does not plan on reuniting the lovers ever
again.

The research program isn’t quite as interested in helping its subjects
control or suppress their powers as promised either. In fact, while Slovak has
developed an intermittently working drug to suppress psychic powers for a time,
his research goal is to give himself psychokinetic powers. This he does by
extracting some of his victims’ spinal fluid, extracting the magical psi juice,
and injecting that into his own neck. Which, as it turns out, has rather severe
side effects.

So things will get bloody once Zack realizes he has developed a tolerance
against the psi-suppressants he is shot up with, and he and Rachel go on the
run.

Obviously, Joe Begos’s The Mind’s Eye is – aesthetically and in its
content – deeply inspired by early 80s psi thrillers and horror movies, and
plays out like the entertaining dumb fun brother of Cronenberg’s
Scanners, a role all of that film’s actual sequels aspired to but never
managed to reach. The closeness to the Cronenberg film (and comparable movies)
is very much one of general aesthetics, exploding heads, people making
ultra-constipated faces during psychic battles (best in show in that regard is
the inevitable – yet lovely - Larry Fessenden who should be in even more movies
to make psychic battle faces), and the basic plot. What The Mind’s Eye
lacks in comparison is any depth whatsoever. This is strictly what you see is
what you get surface spectacle cinema.

However, I don’t think that’s a bad thing in this case, for Begos’s movie
never pretends to be anything else, nor does it try to be anything more than a
movie about people with psychic powers bloodily battling one another. Begos is
rather good at what he’s doing here, too, achieving a unified and highly
effective aesthetic on a very low budget, and making up for what he lacks in the
opportunity to shoot large action set pieces with a mostly fantastic eye for
more intimate as well as doubly bloody action, the sort of thing that should
embarrass quite a few people shooting direct-to-DVD action movies that never
manage to look as good nor feel as exciting.

In its own way, The Mind’s Eye is pretty much a perfect film,
achieving what it sets out to do flawlessly, while looking good and splattering
a lot of bodily fluids across the screen (some of it pleasantly
chocolate-coloured).

Friday, September 2, 2016

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more
glorious Exploder
Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for
the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here
in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or
improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if
you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can
be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

A merry mercenary group working under the delightful moniker of BAM (as the
film explains, this is an acronym for "Bad-ass motherfuckers"), is hired by
shady government types to go on The Mission for them. Now you might ask
yourself: "What's this mission about?". The film isn't going to tell you. It is
in fact withholding this information for its audience's own good, or at least to
spare you wasting too many brain cells, as The Mission will turn out to be not
what our heroes believe it to be, so there surely is no need to bother your
pretty little heads with it.

All members of BAM have manly codenames like Killzone, Blood, or Diddy
Bopper, alas they very seldom use them when talking to each other. The only
thing that's important about them is that their leader is played by Reb Brown
and that the rest of them might just as well be wearing red shirts instead of
army fatigues. Reb ain't too happy when he learns that the team is going to be
accompanied by a man of the Man who just might be called Asshole or Fuck You
(Mel Davison). But what can a Reb do when he's already somewhere in Central
America and on The Mission with his guys?

After the BAMsters have played around with some random guerrillas and picked
up a gal named Virgin (Catherine Hickland), they finally meet the problem they
were brought in to solve without having been told that they are supposed to
solve it - a big bad government cyborg who is running amuck. And IMDB tells me
it's played by Claudio Fragasso! Kill that monster, people of BAM!

Of course, it won't be that easy for the mercenaries, and in the end, only
Virgin's superior chemistry skills and the fact that Robocop was nearly
as successful a film as Predator will conquer the big bad.

And lo! It came to pass that Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragasso watched
Predator. And they saw that it was good. So obviously, they needed to
make a terrible, yet glorious version of the material all their own. Dear
Fragasso is only taking the responsibility for the story this time, whatever
that might mean in a film patently without one, while the writing credit goes to
Rossella Drudi, who has certainly fine qualifications in her future work on
Troll 2, her past work on Hell of the Living Dead and being
married to Fragasso. It's quite the script the couple produced, never giving an
explanation when one would probably be a good idea, never having an idea of its
own when it can manhandle someone else's, and never satisfied stealing from just
one source. Why only rip off Predator, when Robocop is also
there, rife for the picking? It's what you expect from real masters of their
art.

I'd love to go deeply into the principles of Mattei's direction, his
meaningful use of the colour green, the way he uses the adventures of the
BAMsters as a metaphor for all human struggle, but unfortunately I'd just be
making it all up. If you have seen any Mattei film, you know how it looks; if
you haven't, words cannot prepare you for the experience, at least not words I
feel comfortable using.

I'd also love to tell you about the acting performances, alas, there aren't
any. There certainly are people on screen who are speaking some perfectly
bizarre dialogue, and they certainly are actors by trade, but that's all I can
tell you about them, at least not without using words I don't feel comfortable
using when talking about people I have never met and who could probably still
kick my ass in a fight.

Furthermore, I'd love to tell you about the action. Let us just say that
there's a lot of shooting and punching on screen, often executed by BAMsters
standing in a single line, shooting and screaming and avoiding cover like their
Civil War ancestors before them, at other times performed while running and
screaming wildly. And yes, of course there are exploding huts.

Finally, I'd love to tell you about the film's awe-inspiring effects, how the
cyborg dude is dressed in an Ultraman Halloween costume someone has painted
black and makes the same chittering noises a toy robot I once owned makes, but I
don't think I'm fit to do it justice.

I'm afraid I can only leave you with questions about Robowar where I
should be giving answers, but that is part of the nature of the films of Mattei
and Fragasso. I am full of questions about their works myself, starting with the
natural - if very unspecific - ones, like "who gave these people money to make
movies?" and "can I meet him?".

There are, however, more pertinent questions to ask about Robowar.
Why did the script only have five pages? Where did the promised appearance of
Alan Collins/Luciano Pigozzi disappear to? Did the authorities of the
Philippines (where the film was shot) know whom they let into their country and
what terrible consequences their lenience would have for the sanity of mankind?
Why is it that Reb Brown screams whenever he shoots his gun? How does the Cyborg
manage to hit anyone with his pew-pew laser gun when his point of view shots
show clearly that he sees the world as a random conglomerate of orange pixels?
What exactly was the government's idea in sending the mercenaries there? Did I
really need to see Reb Brown in a belly top?

So many questions, yet so little answers. And that, my friends, is the point
of the works of Mattei and Fragasso. They help us understand the importance of
asking questions we never even knew we had, and show us that answers about the
world that permitted the insane duo to make more than one movie can only be
found in the tears of laughter rolling down our cheeks while we are watching
them.